Rare movie Jedda on NITV
1955 film was the first Australian feature to use Aboriginal actors as leads, and the first to be filmed in colour.
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On Sunday NITV screens a rarity, the 1955 film Jedda.
This remastered version of director Charles Chauvel’s was the first Australian feature film to use Aboriginal actors in the lead roles (Robert Tudawali and Ngarla Kunoth) and the first to be filmed in colour.
Chauvel was nominated for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for the film.
An Aboriginal woman dies in childbirth on a remote cattle station in the Northern Territory. The baby girl, Jedda, is raised by the station owner’s wife, Sarah McMann, after the death of her own child. Jedda grows up between cultures – forbidden from learning about her own, but not fully accepted by the other. Her white mother Sarah wants to ‘civilise’ Jedda but Sarah’s husband Doug believes she will lose her ‘pride of race’.
Sunday, 14 February at 9.30pm on NITV.
7 Responses
I remember seeing it on TV in the early 70’s and have kept an eye out for it for a few years now, I am really glad that it is getting aired, PVR ready !!
Also available on bluray(and dvd) from umbrella entertainment, since 2015.
It’s not rare. The National Film and Sound Archive (and before it the National Library) has had copies for years and regularly hires them out to schools and community groups. I saw it at school in the early 1970s.
Unless you can cite a TV broadcast I’m sticking with rare.
ABC screened it in 1994 as part of NAIDOC week if that’s of any interest 🙂
televisionau.com/2014/07/1994-july-9-15.html
Can’t quote any more recent airdates at this stage although I’m surprised C31 hasn’t aired it as they’ve been screening a number of Umbrella DVD titles in recent months.
All of 22 yrs.
The ‘rare’ moniker still stands I guess 🙂